Claudia Rankine

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered…

— Claudia Rankine

I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that…

— Claudia Rankine

I was really interested in the fact that blacks have high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes at a higher percentage than…

— Claudia Rankine

You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you're constantly waiting to see that they recognize that…

— Claudia Rankine

“There is/no reasoning with need.”

— Claudia Rankine

“The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining…

— Claudia Rankine

When you achieve it fully, you create something that's transparent - that people can move into and through their own experiences. As…

— Claudia Rankine

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

— Claudia Rankine

I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are…

— Claudia Rankine

I'm not comfortable, for myself and for others. And yet, one has these people whom you trust, have faith in, whom you…

— Claudia Rankine

“Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and breathe you have to create a truce -…

— Claudia Rankine

“So what is forgiveness and how does it show itself?”

— Claudia Rankine

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just…

— Claudia Rankine

“That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmanoeuvred years, had you in a…

— Claudia Rankine

I think of the described dynamics as a fluid negotiation. I don't think these specific interactions can happen to the black or…

— Claudia Rankine

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's…

— Claudia Rankine